Absolute power corrupts: What Saddam teaches us about
unlimited power
By W. James Antle III
web posted December 22, 2003
With the fallen dictator Saddam Hussein now in U.S. custody, it
is only a matter of time before some form of trial will expose the
full extent of his crimes against the Iraqi people and his
neighbors. This will compound what we already know of the
cruelty and barbarism of his regime.
Mass graves found by coalition forces are believed to contain
some 300,000 Iraqis murdered during Hussein's 23-year reign.
The fall of Baghdad revealed torture chambers and prisons set
aside to hold children. It is believed that he drove close to a fifth
of his population from their homes. He infamously used chemical
weapons against the Kurds in 1988. With a record as vile as
this, who knows what else will be discovered.
Yet Hussein is by no means unique in using his awesome powers
to inflict destruction, human suffering and death upon unfortunate
victims. Retired Gen. Wesley Clark took time out of his
campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination to testify
against former Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic, the
"Butcher of the Balkans" now facing prosecution for war crimes.
Although the precise death toll is in dispute, Milosevic fanned the
flames of nationalist warfare throughout his rule and stands
accused of being the architect of ethnic cleansing in Bosnia,
Kosovo and elsewhere in the former Yugoslavia.
The 20th century was particularly bloody due to the
depredations of tyrannical regimes. In the Soviet Union, some 27
million were killed by Joseph Stalin alone. Adolf Hitler had 6
million Jews murdered during the Holocaust and a like number of
other civilians in territories under his control over the same
period. Pol Pot's actions led to the death of a fifth of Cambodia's
population. More recently, we have seen 800,000 Tutsis perish
in Rwanda in 1994 alone, some 2 million civilians killed in
Sudan's civil war and another 2 million starved or killed by Kim
Jong Il's North Korea. In his book Death by Government, R.J.
Rummel estimated that governments killed a total of 170 million
of their own people during the 20th century, not including
soldiers killed in wars.
It is difficult to fathom how such inhuman behavior could even be
possible. The conventional explanation is that the dictators
responsible for these deaths are evil personified. To be sure,
Saddam Hussein and his ilk represent a particularly evil and
sadistic group of people. But it would be a mistake to ignore the
degree to which their savage cruelty was not just enabled but
also encouraged by the awesome powers they wielded over
other people.
As Lord Acton wrote, "Power tends to corrupt, and absolute
power corrupts absolutely." The aforementioned dictators had
the ability to take whatever they wanted from their people at
whatever price without any consequences. That is an enormous
amount of power to have – it is the power to shape and control
and the destinies of others for one's own gain. This is not a
power that should be entrusted to any human being.
Dictators are surrounded by people who, out of fear and sheer
sycophancy, always tell them exactly what they want to hear.
They eventually come to live in something close to an alternate
reality. The traditionalist blogger Lawrence Auster recently
paraphrased Plato's observation in the fourth book of The
Republic that "the tyrant lives in an extended hallucination, a
dream state in which he feels free to act out every desire, no
matter how perverse." A person whose mind is enshrouded by
such hallucinations sees no reason why he shouldn't summarily
execute an associate who has crossed him or commit some other
grave evil to instill fear in others.
Obviously it's better to be governed by virtuous and responsible
people rather than the depraved and insane, but people who
attribute all the horrors accompanying tyranny to the character
(or lack thereof) of the tyrant are rather missing the point: Simply
allowing people to hold unlimited power is an invitation for evil, a
tragic error which if uncorrected will almost certainly result in
terrible consequences over time.
This is why constitutional government, with effective checks and
balances against various people in positions of limited power, is
more than a procedural concern. Constitutionalists are often
accused of masking their positions on the substance of public
policy in arguments about process. To some extent this may be
true, but in fact there are sound substantive reasons to value
processes that lead to the rule of law rather than arbitrary
government. Without it, government can quickly shift from
protecting our rights to violating them.
People across the political spectrum tend to think of government
as some kind of magical "other," a distant being that exists with a
mind and personality of its own. Of course, all governments are
entirely human institutions. This becomes even more pronounced
when the vast bulk of government powers are invested in a single
person, as is the case in a dictatorship. The capacity of human
beings to wrong others for their own benefit is well-documented
throughout history; one of G.K. Chesterson's most famous
remarks is that original sin is the only Christian doctrine that can
actually be proven by reading the newspaper everyday.
It is nevertheless common to think that it is perfectly legitimate to
discard the limits on government as long as the purpose is to
empower it to do good rather than evil. But we seldom anticipate
the ends to which power will be used. That is why the allocation
of power is a decision to be carefully considered.
The holidays are an opportune time for those of us living in free
societies to reflect on our good fortune. As an American, I am
thankful to have been given the gift of liberty wrapped in the
Constitution.
W. James Antle III is a senior editor for Enter Stage Right.
Enter Stage Right -- http://www.enterstageright.com